One of the great stains in San Jose’s past is the 1933 lynching of two white men in St. James Park. Nearly 25 years ago, my predecessor as a local columnist, Harry Farrell, wrote a book called “Swift Justice” that vividly described the events in the square that night.

Now the man who owns the film and stage rights to the book, ex-Mayor Tom McEnery, is presenting a play based on Farrell’s work in a Tabard Theatre Company production at San Pedro Square. The play, called “Swift Justice” as well, opens Jan. 15.

I sat down with the ex-mayor the other day at a Peet’s Coffee house. And while he was cagey about giving away details of the play, he does say that it is “bookended” by the insights and memories of a rabbi-turned-judge who was there that night, Joseph Karesh.

Karesh lived well into the 1990s, having enjoyed a lengthy judicial career that included presiding over San Francisco’s Zebra murders trial in the 1970s. But in the early ’30s, Karesh served as a rabbi at San Jose’s Congregation Bikkur Cholim, which no longer exists. Karesh spoke out against the lynching.

McEnery’s play opens with a fictional scene of Karesh being interviewed by a reporter at Santa Clara University in 1995. She asks him why he left work as a rabbi for the law and the bench. “It wasn’t so much a decision, as it was an epiphany,” he says.

And from there he tells the story. Brooke Hart, the scion of the family that owned Hart’s Department Store at Market and Santa Clara streets, had just left the store and was walking to his car on Nov. 9, 1933, when he was kidnapped and forced to drive north on Market Street.

An anchor

San Jose was a much different town then. Everyone shopped at Hart’s. The family represented the city’s elite in the best sense, contributing generously to civic causes. Brooke Hart, then 22, had gone to Bellarmine College Prep and Santa Clara University.

Working from a command post at the Hart family mansion on The Alameda (where the YMCA is today), the FBI traced one of the several phone calls from the kidnappers to a parking garage south of the Fairmont Hotel today.

Two men were arrested: Jack Holmes, the brains of the operation, and his pliable confederate, Harold Thurmond. Thurmond signed a confession saying that the two bound Hart with wire, hit him over the head with a concrete block, and tossed him from the San Mateo Bridge.

When Hart’s decomposed body was found Nov. 26 about a mile south of the eastern stretches of the bridge, the town was ignited with outrage. The kidnappers, it was clear, were bargaining for Hart’s release in bad faith: They had already killed him.

A mob dragged Holmes and Thurmond from the Santa Clara County Jail and lynched them in the park to cheers like, “Hold that line! Hold that line!” (I make a point of mentioning their race: At the time, lynchings were assumed to claim black victims.)

McEnery, who a generation later went to the same schools as Brooke Hart, explores what a horrific event does to a family and a community. “What happens when a 22-year-old is snuffed out?” he asked me. “How do you go forward? How does a family deal with that?”

The Hart family did not withdraw: Brooke’s father, A.J. Hart, who had opposed the lynching, continued to run the store for another decade. Eventually, his place was taken by Brooke’s younger brother, Alex, who had been only 13 at the time of the kidnapping.

Literary license

McEnery, who happens to be the landlord at San Pedro Square, acknowledges that he takes a few liberties with the truth: In the play, Rabbi Karesh, given a message to take to the park, meets the accused Holmes. There’s no evidence that the meeting really occurred.

But McEnery also includes details that reveal historical figures then still young. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover checked in daily, sometimes hourly, with his agents at the St. Claire Hotel, where McEnery’s father was a manager. Then-Alameda County District Attorney Earl Warren, a future governor and Supreme Court chief justice, wanted to prosecute the case.

The ex-mayor sees the savagery in the square as a warning of the violence that was to come six years later with World War II. “It was a harbinger that another world was coming,” McEnery told me.

To a degree we have trouble imagining now, San Jose was a relatively innocent place in 1933, an agricultural town based on fruit-picking and canneries. However much the lynchers were praised at the time, what happened in the square robbed the town of that innocence. Yet McEnery also professes to see hope in the outcome. It’s a worthy topic for a play.

FYI: There will be a panel discussion on the topic at the Tabard Theatre on Jan. 9 at 7 p.m. The participants are McEnery, District Attorney Jeff Rosen, Superior Court Judge Paul Bernal and John Karesh, the son of Rabbi Joseph Karesh. You can get tickets to the play at the Tabard website (www.tabardtheatre.org) or by calling 408-679-2330.